“Maybe at some point, the new Pizza Delicious fans will show up and buy some pizza. But social advertising is so new that nobody knows for sure. It’s still unproven, untested and largely unstudied.”

So this Pizza Delicious company blanketed all of New Orleans with their Facebook ad. For $240 they got that kind of exposure. Ever do a media buy for a billboard at the busiest spot in town? A one-time fee of $240 is a windfall for a small business like that. And how many people do you think have clicked on your street-side billboard?

UPDATE: Oh yeah, and all this is separate from the reality that FB’s real monetary future is tied to credits/currency and not advertising.

What’s interesting to me about incredible growth of Instagram is that it has occured inside a very small (for lack of a better term coming to mind) area of exsposure.

instagram.com/oiler

In other words, Instagram users are iPhone users and only iPhone users.

And at first I thought that was limiting their success. But it could just be that is a key reason they have exploaded the way they have.

As a long time Android user, I’ve been watching Instagram from the sidelines. I see my family and friends use it daily but I couldn’t break in to the community because there was no app for my Sprint-powered Nexus S.

In a way, it reminds me of early 2006 when I was working with a group of college seniors on a political campaign. I’d watch them spend all day with facebook.com open in their browsers and it didn’t take me long to know I wanted needed in. But I had to wait. I didn’t have a .edu email address. I wasn’t a part of the group.

Now think about Instagram. How do you view Instagram photos? Discovery is frequently made on Twitter and until now less frequently made on Facebook. But really the only way to view a river feed of photos is within the app. The whole experience, really, is inside their iOS app. That’s really limiting their audience and in a way I think contributing to its growth. Not everyone can have it. But it seems like everyone is using it. And the people that are actually using it share a commonality (in this case, iOS). Sounds a lot like Facebook, circa 2006.

So in mid-Decemeber, I bought an unlocked iPhone (more on that later).
And now I’ve finally become a part of the Instagram community.

But now I wonder what the future holds for a company that (perhaps unintentionally) has thrived on such exclusivity.

Facebook knows what its members apparently do not, which is that today’s Facebook won’t allow the service to survive on the social Internet of tomorrow.

Facebook used to be special. But now social is everywhere. Facebook finds itself trying to sell snow to Eskimos.

The only way for Facebook (or any online service for that matter) to succeed is to re-invent itself.

I feel very fortunate to have had an opportunity to work in early 2006 with college kids from Duke, Princeton and NYU. I looked on in awe as they spent their entire days on Facebook. And when the service became available to all later that year, I was one of the first to sign up.

The author here, Mike Elgan, gets it right when he says that Facebook needs to reinvent itself.

But Yahoo’s problem is one of identity. It has too many and none at the same time. That’s not Facebook’s problem. They are still the phonebook of the internet. Their growth was finite because people are finite. But their purpose is still as valid today as it was five years ago.

Yahoo has no vision. It has no purpose. It’s dispensable. Yahoo continues like a zombie, animated by the life it once had.

And that’s what Facebook is becoming. Yes, they’ll continue to have users. And yes, they’ll continue to make money. But Facebook is looking increasingly like a one-trick pony that doesn’t have the vision to reinvent itself for the post-Facebook era.

Whoa. Elgan gets it right all the way to the end. Facebook has no vision?

Yes, I don’t see the same obsessive use now that I did in 2006. But Facebook is still the first place I go to reach out to people outside of my close network. It’s one thing to argue that you don’t agree with Facebook’s roadmap, but to say they don’t have vision is surprisingly incorrect.

Since they are about to make some big announcements at F8. I’d wait for that before buying nails.

I’m not sure I like the subscribe feature. If there’s public stuff I want people to see, I tweet it. But good for facebook of trying to win back some of that market, but for me facebook has become just for family and friends.

I agree with using FB mostly for family and friends but I do like the feature. It solves the problem for public people who don’t want to have to maintain a fan page… which is a very Wall-oriented, public community.

It’s amazing how fast things can change in the digital space.
I step away for a long lunch with my parents and everything changes as Facebook announces a subscribe button. And on top of that, I've got 13 newly opened tabs to read that were linked to within the last 90 minutes from people I follow on Twitter.

I put this up on G+ last week, but it probably deserves a place here since I still stand behind the whole ‘own your own content’ philosophy.

Finally figured out what G+ is for (at least to me).

The revelation comes from how I’ve trimmed my Twitter’s following list. I follow Om Malik but not GigaOm. I follow Danny Sullivan but not SearchEngineLand. On twitter, I follow people I don’t know but want to learn from.

On Facebook, I keep up with close friends and family.

It’s through Google Reader that I bring Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, the NY Times and all the other ‘brands’ into my life.

G+ has to make that experience better. Integrate it with Reader and add a layer on top. And bring it to the workplace. I don’t want to share on FB or TW most things I see in my Reader that interest me because the audience is wrong. But if my coworkers and peers were all here, it would make sense.

Twitter is for following. Facebook is for family. G+ is for work.

And in the days that have passed since writing this, I’ve found myself curating my main twitter news feed even more in this direction (people over brands).

I’ve even gone so far as to consider unfollowing TechCrunch as I’ve been skipping past their stuff more and more as I continue to rely more on Reader to scan through their headlines (I’ll still follow @parislemon though).

And the whole ‘Brands and social media’ discussion took another turn today when Amber Osborne reminded me at lunch over what a local Tampa company called UNation is building over at their offices just north of my home town of Temple Terrace.

In sum, I truly believe right now that people will continue to connect with individuals more as digital social media has a chance to settle in to their everyday lives and brands will be pushed into a corner of their digital social experience.